This chapter examines the policy influence of churches under autocratic and democratic regimes. The main analysis focuses on Zambia and Ghana, both of which have undergone numerous periods of democratization and autocratization. The chapter shows how liberal democratic institutions improve the ability of churches to accomplish their educational policy goals in these two countries and, suggestively, across sub-Saharan Africa more generally by giving churches greater influence over policymaking and protecting their agreements with the state.

This chapter draws on original data on church activism in defense of democracy to test various theories of why churches engage in democratic activism. It demonstrates that churches with more involvement in providing education are more likely to speak out in defense of liberal democratic institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, independent of country-level or denominational trends. In contrast, the data provide limited support for alternative explanations.

This chapter examines whether decisions of Catholic churches to speak out in support of liberal democratic institutions depend on their reliance on state fiscal transfers. It draws on a novel data set that measures the annual pro-democracy activism of churches through an examination of their public pastoral letters. An exogenous policy intervention – the introduction of universal primary education policies across sub-Saharan Africa between 1994 and 2008 – shows that the introduction of policies that increase church dependence on the state for financing of their schools reduces their willingness to speak out in defense of liberal democratic institutions.

This chapter explains how liberal democratic institutions provide a solution to the problem that rulers cannot otherwise credibly commit to forgoing the introduction of regulations that increase state control over church activities. In particular, churches have greater autocratic risk when they have historically invested in activities, such as church schools, that the state has high capacity to regulate. As a result, churches with significant education systems have greater incentive to speak out in support of liberal democratic institutions, although this incentive is mitigated when their schools are fiscally dependent on the government to operate.

This chapter considers the political effects of church activism in support of liberal democracy, contrasting the effects of church activism in Zambia and Tanzania between 2016 and 2021. Drawing on interviews, survey data, and combined endorsement/conjoint candidate experiments in both countries, I show how churches in Zambia have galvanized international actors, domestic elites, and public opinion in support of democratic institutions, while churches in Tanzania have had more limited success.

This chapter discusses the implications of the book for understanding democracy and democratic activism beyond churches in sub-Saharan Africa. It emphasizes that some churches employ coalitional strategies to advance their interests, and, in such cases, their attitudes toward liberal democracy are contingent on whether doing so will advance or hinder the power of their preferred parties. It also shows that some churches rely on liberal democracy as an institutional guarantee of their interests, suggesting that my argument applies to churches beyond Africa. It concludes by explaining how the theory can be applied to other types of actors in other regions of the world.

This chapter demonstrates that churches have often engaged in activism for liberal democratic institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, and yet existing scholarship provides little guidance in explaining why churches sometimes engage in this type of activism while others do not. It sketches out an argument for why some churches have an interest in liberal democratic institutions because they protect them from rulers unilaterally introducing regulations that reduce their control of key church activities. It argues that church schools have particular risk of regulation by rulers, giving churches that run greater number of schools particular incentives to support liberal democratic institutions. It also argues that this risk is mitigated when churches are highly dependent on the state for financing activities.

Chapter 6 focuses on the political structure of a rational state. In the Philosophy of Right, by handing the bulk of the state’s political power to unelected agents, Hegel is in effect compromising the reconciliation of particular and collective interests he regards as essential to a rational political order. However, his wariness of democracy is more than a mere relapse into some pre-modern, reactionary standpoint. This chapter argues that Hegel is right to denounce the atomism favoured by mass electoral systems, which tend to reduce the citizens’ political identity to that of individual voters, but that he is wrong to dismiss mass democracy altogether. His critique is overly severe because his conception of democracy presupposes the liberal logic of civil society, which he attempts to sublate in a strictly political manner. As this chapter seeks to show, the atomism he argues against is best avoided not by limiting democracy, but by extending it to the economic sphere. In a democracy that is both political and economic, individuals are no longer mere atoms, but part of collective social units organized around commonly held goals.

Little attention has been paid to competitive dynamics from a political perspective, despite numerous instances of political competition across cultures and systems. In liberal democratic societies, political competition is legalized, allowing citizens to elect leaders who represent their ideas. Conversely, in totalitarian societies, citizens lack voting rights, and political authority is not challenged through democratic means. However, political competitions still occur among ruling elites, often through purges to seize power. This chapter explores political competition, particularly in totalitarian regimes, where purges eliminate rivals among ruling elites. The collapse of such regimes has marked an evolution toward freedom and equal opportunities for all individuals, regardless of background, which aligns with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Highlighting the lack of research on political competitions from an evolutionary psychology perspective, this chapter underscores the need for future research on human emotions and competitive behaviors in the political arena.

Impartiality as a property of government is central to many of the major constitutional concerns of liberal democracy. This essay tersely considers the nature and implications of impartiality in three main areas: the rule of law; the distinction between the right and the good; and freedom of speech. Because of constraints of space, each of the discussions in this paper is no more than a sketch of the complex matters that are at issue in debates over impartiality.

This chapter explores the various ways that liberal internationalism has sought to use international institutions to build cooperative systems of order. I start by outlining liberal internationalism’s tradition of thinking about institutions and peaceful change. Liberalism and liberal internationalism are defined by their deep assumptions about modernity, development, and progress as well as by their focus on the challenges of adapting liberal democracy and international order to modernization and rising interdependence. After this, I turn to five system-structural “problems” that liberal internationalism has grappled with over the past two centuries. These are the problems of anarchy, hierarchy, interdependence, liberal openness, and geopolitical vulnerability. Across millennia, the two dominant forms of international order have been either anarchy or hierarchy. Liberal internationalism has been deeply entangled with both types of order. Yet, despite this, its overall ideas and projects have been oriented toward creating a “third way” between anarchy and hierarchy. In all these pursuits, liberals have used institutions as tools and ordering arrangements to solve problems and promote peaceful change.

In this book, I examined how public authorities’ reliance on algorithmic regulation can affect the rule of law and erode its protective role. I conceptualised this threat as algorithmic rule by law and evaluated the EU legal framework’s safeguards to counter it. In this chapter, I summarise my findings, conclude that this threat is insufficiently addressed (Section 6.1) and provide a number of recommendations (Section 6.2). Finally, I offer some closing remarks (Section 6.3). Algorithmic regulation promises simplicity and a route to avoid the complex tensions of legal rules that are continuously open to multiple interpretations. Yet the same promise also threatens liberal democracy today, as illiberal and authoritarian tendencies seek to eliminate plurality in favour of simplicity. The threat of algorithmic rule by law is hence the same that also threatens liberal democracy: the elimination of normative tensions by essentialising a single view. The antidote is hence to accept not only the normative tensions that are inherent in law but also the tensions inherent in a pluralistic society. We should not essentialise the law’s interpretation, but embrace its normative complexity.

Recent years have witnessed the rise of a range of authoritarian populist, illiberal, far-right, nativist, and extremist parties. We have seen democratic structures threatened or incrementally dismantled through the subversion of an established democratic party by an outsider or ascendance of the extremist wing of a right-wing party. Parties and party leaders occupying an ill-defined space on the political spectrum today generally present a much greater threat to democratic governance than overtly antidemocratic fringe outfits. The ambiguity of such parties, their growing size, their entry into government, the subversion of “good” democratic parties by a “bad” leadership, and the rise of the “shadow party” mean that contemporary political party threats seriously frustrate the possibility of remedial action afforded by existing public law and policy mechanisms. They also require us to reflect anew on crafting novel remedies and to revisit our assumptions about parties as creatures of central constitutional importance.